Bug#923791: synaptic and most screen recording apps don't work on Wayland

[Paul Gevers]

Package: release-notes

Discussed in bug 818366 (and merged ones).

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: RC bugs in synaptic
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2019 02:04:06 -0500
From: Jeremy Bicha <***@debian.org>
To: aul Gevers <***@debian.org>, ***@bugs.debian.org,
***@bugs.debian.org
CC: zaoqi <***@outlook.com>, ***@mailna.biz, Schmidt Cristian
Hernan <***@gmail.com>, Ben Finney <***@debian.org>

These bugs are almost certainly duplicate of https://bugs.debian.org/818366

Could you handle marking them as duplicates? (Sorry, I find it tedious
to do that in Debian.)

I don't think Synaptic is going to work on Wayland in time for Buster
regardless of how many RC bugs we file against it. Maybe severity:
important is good enough with a mention in the Release Notes that
Debian GNOME uses Wayland by default and you'll need to log in to
"GNOME on Xorg" if you want to use certain apps like Synaptic or most
screen recording apps.

Jeremy

[Debian Bug Tracking System]

Your message dated Sun, 21 Apr 2019 20:01:25 +0200
with message-id <20db4e5b-6ccf-91c6-8331-***@debian.org>
and subject line Re: synaptic and most screen recording apps don't work on Wayland
has caused the Debian Bug report #923791,
regarding synaptic and most screen recording apps don't work on Wayland
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

(NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this
message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system
misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact ***@bugs.debian.org
immediately.)

[Justin B Rye]

https://salsa.debian.org/ddp-team/release-notes/commit/5496e24

Tentative patch attached.

<section id="apps-in-gnome-on-wayland">
<title>Some applications don't work in GNOME on Wayland</title>
<para>
In contrast to Debian releases before buster, <literal>Wayland</literal> is
now the default display manager that is used by

This sounds as if we're drawing a contrast between Wayland and Stretch.

"Display manager" is things like gdm and xdm; Xorg's a display *server*.

(Should we in fact be talking about this as "Wayland vs Xorg" or is it
"Wayland vs the X Window System"? "Xorg" is just the metapackage to
install the X.Org implementation of an X11 server... but then again if
GNOME calls the option "Xorg" we presumably need to follow their lead,
even if $XDG_SESSION_TYPE does classify it as "X11".)

<literal>GNOME</literal>. <literal>GNOME</literal> used to default to
<literal>Xorg</literal> in the past. Some applications, including the

We don't usually put <literal> tags around things that are "upstream
software brand names" (and if we did we'd presumably want to do it in
the title line too).

We could boil all this down to
GNOME in buster has changed its default display server from Xorg to Wayland.

popular package manager <systemitem role="package">synaptic</systemitem>

Is gparted also a problem case that's worth mentioning?

and most screen recording applications, have not been updated to work
properly under <literal>Wayland</literal>. In order to use these packages,
one needs to login with <literal>GNOME on Xorg</literal>.

The verb is two words, "log in". Maybe this should be "log in with a
<literal>GNOME on Xorg</literal> session"?

(Unless the option in fact says "Gnome on Xorg", as some docs claim?
I can't find any similar string in the sources...)